The Form
Baum's Policeman Bluejay partakes of a deep tradition in literature and storytelling, folklore and myth, which employs the animal world, especially birds and bees, as metaphor for the human condition. Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls is probably the best-known work in this vein, though various others can be cited, most commonly involving birds, and in Indian, Persian, and Arabic literature as well as Western. The trope re-appears in twentieth-century poetry, and in the early twenty-first it is still used to reach and teach young children.
In regard to bees, John Day's play The Parliament of Bees is arguably the most famous of a number of related works. (One major distinction applies: writers like Chaucer and Day were primarily interested in commenting on human society, and used their animal metaphors as means to that end. In Baum's book, the animals and their welfare are the central consideration.)
More generally, talking animals and human/animal transformation are virtually universal in world folklore. Baum's animal fable participates in this ancient tradition.
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Famous quotes containing the word form:
“Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.”
—Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)
“Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any.”
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